12/15/2009

The Patent News, and Question of Balances

Newsflash: Blackboard and Desire2Learn have ended their
dispute. Here's the official press release.

Now, this was a topic that I’ve been asked to comment on
from the first day I arrived on the scene. I promised to review it
carefully but knowing it was a complex topic, I warned it would take some
time. I’ll share now that my investigation led me to weigh in with the
perspective that it was time to bring this to a close and move on. I’m
pleased we’ve now taken that step. A bit of perspective on how my view
evolved:

As a longtime industry observer, assertion of intellectual
property rights amongst commercial competitors didn’t surprise me.I have been a witness to numerous variations
on themes and feature innovations that Blackboard brought to the market as it
evolved. And, in my various executive roles in online learning companies, every
firm I served considered software patents important expressions of their
intellectual property.

Nor was I surprised by the reaction in the marketplace.The LMS software category is the result of many
things, including plenty of community collaboration over a period of many
years.Blackboard both contributed to
and benefited from this history just as every other commercial software company
or commercial open source services firm does today.While many others had patented specific
innovations, the first case played out in public was bound to precipitate a
great deal of concern both about the specific patent and the controversial area
of software patents generally.

I’ve now had the benefit of reviewing the overall IP
portfolio.To my eyes there are unique
contributions in what I’ve seen.And so we
face an important question:what
business conduct best balances our various obligations and aligns with the
values of the client community we serve?

Pondering the balance in this case, I came to the view that
it was best for us to bring the matter with Desire2Learn to a close.This dialog has distracted attention from the
many positive contributions to the industry that Blackboard has made and can
continue to make.An example, one that I envied before arriving,
is the ecosystem Blackboard built through its Blackboard Building Blocks program
and Developer Network.While these
programs aren’t perfect, and not without a profit motive for Blackboard, they
have an operational and technological scale that have offered institutions and entrepreneurs
alike the advantage of lower costs of entry for launching new products and even
new companies.There are many examples
of innovative products and services that now benefit educators that began life
in this way.

So moving ahead, in addition to our own efforts to create, my
focus will be on opening the lens on innovation-spurring programs like these
across the community.I hope to bring
more attention to a story about what our endorsement of key open standards like
the IMS Common Cartridge means in the broader context of whether open educational
standards can succeed.Finally, I hope
that our cadence towards greater system openness will produce more headlines
about our role in driving industry conventions that provide greater customer
benefits.